Company, Brand, Product… It’s Confusing

A lot of folks use the terms company, brand and product interchangeably and it’s usually no big deal. But if you’re going on Jeopardy!, it could be.

In the Jeopardy! match on Monday, April 4th, there was a whole category called “Branded.” and the answer to the $200 Chips Ahoy! clue was Nabisco, a company and a brand. It says so right on the website of parent company, Mondelēz International. Nabisco’s logo is on there, and if you click on Nabisco, it says: “The name Nabisco first appeared on a new sugar wafer product in 1901, but the corporate name did not change from National Biscuit Company to Nabisco, Inc. until 1971. We acquired the Nabisco business in December 2000. Today, Nabisco’s brands include some of the best-known cookies and crackers in the world, including Chips Ahoy!, Oreo and Ritz.” They are showing those cookies and crackers right on their brands page, so if we’re getting this right, Nabisco was a brand, then it was a company, now it’s a brand that has brands.

The very next day, this was the Final Jeopardy! clue: “This cereal brand that’s been with us since the 1920s teamed up with a brewer in 2015 to create a Hefeweizen.”

Check out the video. After the Aleve commercial and before revealing the clue, Alex Trebek says: “Now to a different product in the category ‘Food & Drink,’ here’s the clue for you, players…” But Aleve is a brand of Bayer. Was he trying to tip off the players that they weren’t looking for a company by saying product? If so, it didn’t work but it’s still not hard to see why two of the players were confused by the clue and thought they wanted a company name.

To make things worse, Wheaties is a brand of General Mills and General Mills been with us since the 1920s.

More: Here is a link to Brands You Didn’t Know Were Owned By Other Companies Don’t notice how the title assumes you’re ignorant — notice how it assumes the brands are companies.